Religious learning carries high prestige in the villages. Many village boys receive some kind of special religious training either informally from kinsmen, or from special schools in the towns. A few of these may become village imams; others live a normal agricultural life, but with a special reputation for learning and piety. How far a man succeeds in exploiting this prestige for gaining power and wealth seems to depend on personality and circumstances.
Other non-agricultural occupations and skills are structurally of minor importance. Most specialists are part-time, owning or at least wishing to own land; there are no social groups based on occupations such as the castes of Indian society, nor are craftsmen treated as outsiders.
Urban contacts have probably always conferred great influence and prestige in the villages, chiefly, of course, because they imply influence with officials, an influence often over estimated by villagers. Traditionally, it is likely that the main channels for social promotion lay through the official religious hierarchy. Nowadays, in a village like Elbashï, and even in many poorer ones, people have sons, brothers or affines who are traders or officials, sometimes of fairly high standing, in the urban world. These links give great prestige in the village. Where they exist in numbers as in Elbashï, they seem to be leading to the beginnings of a class structure in the village.
But only the merest beginnings. Village society seems in the past to have had a highly mobile ranking system, with a marked absence of inherited rank. In every generation, each household split, dividing its land at least among the sons, sometimes among both sons and daughters. The richer a man, the more wives and therefore the more heirs he would be likely to have, so that in general there was a tendency for each young married man to find himself on his father's death with a fairly modest amount of land, and thus bound to start building up afresh on his own